


like the sun loves you

by anothercover



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/F, Lesbian Character of Color, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Secret Relationship, allusions to don't ask don't tell on account of the time period, they're lesbians harold, this fic exploded into my brain approximately 14 seconds after the movie ended
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 07:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18048092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothercover/pseuds/anothercover
Summary: Standing on that land, though, under the dripping Spanish moss and fireflies starting to blink bright in the slowly darkening sky, Maria knows what they’re doing here is investing.  In asomedaythat’s not coming for decades: they both love breakneck speed and the sprawling sky too much to even think about putting it down – it’s never even been a conversation, because the way Maria loves speed and the sky is entirely woven into the way she loves Carol.[Pre-and-post Captain Marvel. Maria and Carol are a couple and Monica is their daughter, do not argue with me, I am correct.]





	like the sun loves you

  
  
  


They kissed for the first time in the bathroom at Pancho’s.

Carol never opened the story that way. Obviously. She’s Carol, so she liked to say _the first time I kissed you_ and stamp ownership all over it. 

“First time _I_ kissed _you_ ,” was always Maria’s counter, and it was usually followed by Carol whacking her with a pillow, or Maria bumping her hip against Carol’s while they were washing up, both of them grinning like morons because it was their story and they loved it, however it got told. 

When they weren’t feeling competitive about it, though, that was the agreed-upon version: they kissed for the first time in the bathroom at Pancho’s. There was salt on Carol’s lips and tequila was burning through both of them like wildfire, but neither of them was so drunk they didn’t know what they were doing. Neither of them was going to leave the option to pretend it didn’t happen, laugh it off back on base. 

It was a hot night and Carol was damp with sweat, her arms thin and deceptively strong as she pulled Maria in as hard as Maria pushed her back, up against the paper towel dispenser. If they both wanted to claim _I kissed you_ , they both knew the real answer was that they leapt into it together, a razor-thin margin of a few seconds on either side, and all it ever felt was right. It felt like a book slamming shut at the exact second a new volume cracked open, the two of them spilling ink all over its pages and watching them wriggle into words faster than anybody could read them. 

_Well okay, then,_ Maria remembers thinking. _I guess you’re the girl it’s gonna be._  
  


***

They buy the house in Louisiana together, when Maria’s five months pregnant with Monica.

(“Are we too wild for a baby?” Carol asked once, while she was rubbing Maria’s swollen feet.

“We could dial it back a notch,” Maria said, after thinking about it for a minute. 

“Do we have to stop drag-racing each other?”

“No, that’s fine. Like, obviously not when the baby’s _in_ somebody’s car, but – ”

“You are the love of my whole life, you perfect gem of a woman,” Carol said, and abandoned the foot massage so they could make out instead.)

It’s a long way off; they’re still based on the west coast and their daughter’s going to spend some time growing up in the barracks. But the land is dirt cheap – boggling, really, they lock down that house for a shimmy and a song – and they talk a little about renting it out as an extra source of income. It’ll be a long time before they move in full time. 

Standing on that land, though, under the dripping Spanish moss and fireflies starting to blink bright in the slowly darkening sky, Maria knows what they’re doing here is investing. In a _someday_ that’s not coming for decades: they both love breakneck speed and the sprawling sky too much to even think about putting it down – it’s never even been a conversation, because the way Maria loves speed and the sky is entirely woven into the way she loves Carol. 

They live their life to keep these things. They can’t buy rings, they can’t get a license, the little girl she’s growing inside her body is going to have a Mom and an Auntie Carol instead of Mom and Mama, but this – they can do. 

“Hey, Danvers,” she says, leaning against Carol’s side with one hand tucked in the back pocket of her jeans. “Was this the military lesbian version of getting married?”

Carol snorts a laugh and leans in to kiss Maria’s cheek, slides her own hand along the curve of her stomach. “You’re only getting that now?”  
  


***

After the accident, Maria’s the one who gets handed the burnt, mangled chunk of Carol’s dogtags, because nobody asked and they didn’t tell, but anybody can see they were family, however it was defined.

She squeezes her hand around it more tightly than she should and doesn’t realize that she’s cut the skin of her palm open, a deep bloody split right down her lifeline. 

But she notices eventually, and when she does, she immediately gets a tetanus boost, because there’s Monica. There’s Monica and that means there is no option to let this loss slice her in half, too. She can feel it; she’s allowed to feel it, every single part of it, but their daughter is not going to limp through life with a ghost for a mother. 

The love is bigger than the loss. It has to be. 

Worse when the squadron offers shoulders and shots and sympathy, when they all say nice things that sound right, and Maria’s throat is choking with everything she’s holding in. She can’t scream out that she’s missing her wife and her daughter’s mother and that she knows there’s a shorter shelf-life for everyone’s tolerance in letting her mourn for a best friend. Halved even further by the fact that brass wants this whole event covered up and quiet as quickly as they can.

And it _is_ mourning, even if something down deep in her chest says that Carol’s not dead. There was no body, no remnants even in a blast radius of that size, and she knows that means Carol was too goddamn stubborn to die. But she’s not here, either, and when Maria’s cutting right down to it, it doesn’t feel that different.

She tucks the piece of dogtag in a box with a pair of aviators and the photographs it hurts to look at. She watches Monica sleep in Carol’s flight jacket, wound around her small body like it’s a blanket and she thinks _hurry back to us, baby_.  
  


***

She moves Monica to Louisiana.

She puts up new wallpaper and mows the lawn and goes to Friday fish frys with the neighbors, and when she’s in the air, lost in the cloud cover, she stops expecting to hear Carol’s voice crackling through the comms, but the memory is a good-enough echo. 

She whispers _higher further faster, baby_ to herself every time she’s at the controls, and she doesn’t date, not even the woman who’s a dead ringer for Tia Carrere and makes her interest in Maria _very_ clear at one of those Friday frys. Maria’s not blind or free of hormones, but if she starts something up with Tia Carrere (“it’s actually Abby?”), there’s eventually going to be a mess and ultimately, she’d rather avoid messes.

Plus, she’s sure Carol would _try_ to be understanding, but Maria’s seen what it’s like when she loses her temper. Tia Carrere seems nice enough; she really wouldn’t deserve the fallout.  
  


***

Okay. So.

It’s not exactly the _way_ she expected Carol would come back. In all her fantasies about when the day would eventually roll around, it did not look like a rejected episode of The X-Files, which is a show Maria would be a thousand percent more interested in if it was called Scully. 

But she’s willing to be adaptable. 

Extremely adaptable.  
  


***

It isn’t as though Maria herself is entirely absent from Carol’s memories, once they start trickling back in. They come in little drips and drabs – her favorite karaoke song, her nickname for Monica – and Maria’s _in_ those memories, she’s a featured player. Carol’s hitting all the big moments, the memorable milestones.

What Maria can’t understand is why the nature of their relationship is the part that’s been blotted out. 

And it stings in equal measure to the fact that it’s almost interesting: the relationship isn’t there, but its foundation is entirely intact. Carol trusts her without question, with that deep, endless, thank-God-I-didn’t-fuck-Tia-Carrere-I-would-be-drowning-in-guilt trust. She giggles with Monica and hugs Maria with a grip that feels like she remembers never wanting to let go. Maria can see how much Carol loves her; how much she feels that this is her family, that this was her home.

It’s just that she’s missing the verb that Maria has always placed before it. _I’m IN love with Carol_ had always meant something different from _I love Carol_.

She’s just not sure how she’s supposed to bring a thing like that up. Not after six years and space aliens, not when there’s a little girl involved. She’s been raising Monica on her own and the only time she’s ever really memorably shouted at her was when she dragged the sleeve of that flight jacket through a puddle of ketchup while eating a Happy Meal. 

The longer the time dragged on, the harder Maria knew it would be to stitch their lives back together: she’s seen enough marriages between civilians and military and the toll that years of separation can take to know the drill. But she was always operating under the assumption that they would both at least want to try. It would be work, but it would be work they would want to do, and Maria’s also seen how much of a difference _that_ makes, too.

She’s not facing down a Carol who doesn’t want to work. She’s looking at a Carol who doesn’t remember that there’s a reason for it.

In the end, she decides not to say anything at all. What they’ve been given is enough to be grateful for: answers and explanations and love, which Maria decides isn’t something she can quantify.

Whatever it looks like, at least it’s still here.  
  


***

It’s another seven months before Maria sees Carol again, back from whatever remote planet she’s helped the Skrulls settle.

Long enough that Maria’s gone to dinner with Abby three times and the movies twice. She hasn’t introduced her to Monica yet; she’s started to get comfortable calling Carol her ex. Very amiable, she’s assured Abby, just two lives that started moving in different directions, which is true, technically! It leaves out a lot of details, but nobody wants to hear that many details about somebody’s past when they’re trying to become their present.

Carol would be hard enough to compete with _before_ she had glowing hands and could fly without the help of a jet.

Monica’s sleeping over with her grandparents for the night, and for a couple minutes in the movie theater parking lot, Maria thinks about inviting Abby over. She only decides against it when she remembers that they took separate cars because she’s still trying to feel her way into this. They agree that Casino was way too long and mostly about white people nonsense, kiss quickly and make plans to do it again sometime soon.

She’s humming along to Alanis Morrisette on the radio – this song is a goddamn earworm, it’s entirely unavoidable – and when she pulls up to her house, Carol’s sitting on the porch.

Maria’s heart stutters and stops and starts back up in her chest in what feels like the same moment. 

She has been forcibly training herself to move on, with discipline and focus; pilots have muscle memory and the heart is just another muscle. A flash of blonde hair, though, that blue and red and gold flight suit, and it’s a muscle that remembers years better than it can remember a couple of months. 

“You make a wrong turn on your way back from Mars?” she asks, smiling as she climbs out of her car. 

“If they’d settled on Mars, I could have been back here in under a week,” Carol says. 

“Oh, right. How embarrassing for me.”

Carol grins. That same familiar grin and Maria’s walking across the yard way too quickly, but Carol’s rushing to meet her and she feels her feet leave the ground as Carol spins and spins, clutching her the way she did on the day she came back.

 _We kissed at Pancho’s_ , Maria thinks. _It was the eighties and it was desert-hot and we were four tequila shots deep, and we kissed in the bathroom. That day happened even if I’m the only one who remembers it and we will have always kissed on that day._

When Carol finally sets her back down, Maria tries to let go. 

She isn’t expecting Carol to pull her back in, not surrendering. Not giving up.

“Something bugged me,” she says. “I’ve thought about it a lot, while I was gone again, and there’s something about this house that bugged me.”

“Yeah, there’s a couple rotting floorboards on the porch,” Maria says. “It gets so hot here in the summer, they just keep warping – ”

“Monica said we were a family. And I lived here at least enough of the time that you had a crapload of my stuff.” She pauses, purposefully, dragging it out. “There’s only two bedrooms in this house.”

“Yep,” Maria says, after a moment. “That’s some excellent calculating there, Danvers.”

She has seen Carol actually literally glow from the inside out. The smile that lights her face now isn’t quite the same as watching the energy contained in her body spiral out and envelop her in sparks and waves. 

It’s not far from it, either.

“I’m sorry it took so long to come back,” Carol says. “I’m sorry I was so far away from you once it finally did.”

When they add the next chapter onto their story, this new chapter after too many blank pages, there won’t be any competition. There’s not going to be a debate or an old, worn-in argument. Whatever comes next, whatever complications and work and stitching-together will have to happen, the next time they tell their story, Maria is going to make goddamn sure that Carol knows exactly the sentence to start with. 

Maria cups Carol’s face in her hands – skin warm to the touch and soft under her palms – and without another word, kisses her wife, kicks the word _ex_ out of her heart, and finally, finally, welcomes her home.

  
  
  


  
  
  



End file.
